Franco Rossi's SMOG (1962) — hosted by Alison Martino

As part of PRS's YesterdayLA 2026 series—a month-long exploration of the people, places, and works of art that have become part of the fabric of Los Angeles history—7th House is proud to present Franco Rossi's long-lost Italian arthouse gem, SMOG (1962), hosted by Alison Martino, creator of Vintage Los Angeles, on-air host for Spectrum News, and one of the city's most esteemed and beloved chroniclers of mid-century Los Angeles, its disappearing architecture, and its cultural history.

One of the great outsider views of Los Angeles and one of cinema's most extraordinary records of the city's mid-century architecture, Smog has long occupied a special place in the imaginations of cinephiles and Los Angeles historians.

The film follows Vittorio (Enrico Maria Salerno), a conservative Roman attorney stranded in Los Angeles on a forty-eight-hour layover. Emerging from LAX carrying little more than his bag, Vittorio begins wandering the City of Angels on foot, exploring an alien landscape of car lots, oil fields, diners, and modernist landmarks, from Paul R. Williams's space-age Theme Building at LAX to Pierre Koenig's Stahl House and Bernard Judge's geodesic Triponent ("Bubble") House. After committing his first foreign faux pas—walking in L.A.—he falls in with a sexy and slightly sinister group of Italian expatriates who guide him on a meandering odyssey through the city, one that gradually gives way to an existential crisis. As he drifts from one encounter to the next, Vittorio finds himself equally seduced and unsettled by a Los Angeles whose freedoms and possibilities seem as intoxicating as they are confounding.

After premiering at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, Smog vanished into studio vaults and became virtually impossible to see, surviving for many only through a striking poster and a handful of intriguing, imagination-sparking stills. Sixty years later, the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna exhumed the surviving elements and—in collaboration with the UCLA Film & Television Archive—embarked on an ambitious and meticulous restoration effort that, finally, brought Vittorio back to Los Angeles. Six decades after his first bewildered steps out of LAX, he arrived on the big screen at UCLA's 2024 Festival of Preservation, where audiences were able to join his drift through our city and finally experience Rossi's extraordinary film for themselves.

Now, this remarkable long-lost film has found its way to PRS's screen for a rare opportunity to experience this preserved portrait of a Los Angeles lost in the haze of its complexities, contradictions, and futurist dreams.

Dir. Franco Rossi, 1962, 101 mins, Italy/United States, English/Italian w/ English subtitles, Unrated, Digital.

Tickets: $12 (All Screenings Are In Person Only)

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